Ce texte est publié en anglais. Le musée ne l'a pas traduit et préfère vous le dire plutôt que de vous présenter une traduction automatique.
What are enamelled Shrinathji and Ganga pendants?
They are devotional pendants made to be worn: an image of a deity — Shrinathji, the form of Krishna worshipped at Nathdwara, or the river goddess Ganga — carried in gold and coloured enamel, or painted in miniature on wasli and set behind glass. They belong equally to two crafts, jewellery and miniature painting, and in this collection they are held in both.
Two groups of pendants in the jewellery gallery sit exactly on the seam between the museum's two largest holdings. One group is goldsmith's work: enamel fired into cut recesses, colour by colour. The other is a painter's: a face two centimetres high, brushed onto wasli — layered handmade paper — with a brush that may be a single squirrel hair.
In this entry
- Shrinathji, and where the image comes from. Nathdwara, the Pushtimarg tradition, and why the deity is shown as he is.
- The sixteen pendants. Format, colours, and what the group has in common.
- How gold meenakari is made. Cutting, filling, firing order, polishing.
- The Ganga pendants. Twenty miniatures on wasli, and the painting tradition they belong to.
- Worn, not displayed. Wear, repair and the evidence of use.
- What to look at first. A short route through the case.
Two crafts, one object
Meenakari is fired in descending order of temperature. White and the most heat-tolerant colours go in first; the fugitive colours — a true rose, certain greens — go in last, because a second firing at the higher heat would destroy them. A pendant that carries five colours has therefore been through the furnace five times, and each firing risks everything already in it.
The painted pendants ask the opposite discipline. Nothing can be reheated and nothing can be undone; the paint is applied in dozens of translucent layers and burnished from behind. The same tradition, at a larger scale, fills the paintings and manuscripts gallery.